


Graceless Heart

by HakureiRyuu



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Families of Choice, Gaslighting, Gen, Grief, Hurt/Comfort, Whump, mentions of several other characters but they're all background, none of it happens onscreen though, one unfortunate stop on the BFS road trip, references to and fallout of wrists being cut against one’s will
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:01:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26570347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HakureiRyuu/pseuds/HakureiRyuu
Summary: They had found Eternia. Adora’s long-lost family, dangled on the end of a string like a lure. Parents. A twin brother. All the belonging she had always longed for. She fell for it, of course, selfish, sentimental fool that she was. The only things left on Eternia were ghosts.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 131





	Graceless Heart

**Author's Note:**

> The initial beats of this story, as well as a bunch of the phrasing for the first page or so, are very much inspired by a Good Omens fic called “Invoke”, by AlatusNora. I read it and immediately imagined a similar scenario with Adora, so I had to write it down. Went off in a completely different direction pretty quickly though, so I figured it was worth posting.

“Hey, Adora?”

She feels... heavy. Distant. Like she is lying at the bottom of a river, simply watching the world roll by.

_“Adora!”_

A hand touches her shoulder, her hair, her _hands_ ‒ she flinches away, and the familiar voice latches onto the movement like a lifeline.

“Adora, _wake the hell up!_ Entrapta can’t stay ahead of the jamming signal forever, we have to move!”

Adora’s eyes open. Shadowed walls, shot through with sluggish lines of dim circuit light. Triangular corridor. A cell. And ‒ someone. Someone looming over her. She jerks, awareness of _pain_ returning to her body, and a whine builds in her throat.

“Shhh, hey, it’s just me. Can you stand?” Parts of a face swim together, but can’t seem to stick. Adora’s eyes flutter. “Whoawhoawhoa, _stay with me._ Can you stand?”

The question is sharp, direct, and Adora can just barely place the tone. “C-Catra?”

An explosion, not all that distant, and what little illumination the walls provide blinks abruptly out. “That’s our cue,” Catra announces. “Time to blow this place.”

“Where...?” Adora doesn’t want to move, but Catra is insistent, pulling one arm over her own shoulder and dragging Adora upright. Pain flares, and she lists with a cry, crashing into Catra’s side. The other stumbles under the sudden weight with a muttered curse. 

Something is dripping from somewhere. It’s pitch black and hard to tell; she feels so lightheaded.

“Shit,” Catra mutters again, more angrily this time. “Adora, can you transform into She-Ra?”

“Won’t,” Adora slurs reflexively. She can’t quite remember why that’s so important. Where is ‒?

“Figured.” Catra’s voice is tight, unhappy. “Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here soon enough.”

Adora can barely place her feet.. Her head won’t stop spinning. “S’dark...”

“I can see in the dark, dumbass. Now c’mon, we gotta get back to the ship.”

“Where’s Adam?”

Catra freezes. Careless claws pierce Adora’s skin, a sting that barely registers against everything else. “Already ahead of us,” she answers levelly.

Adora gives a slow, uneven nod. They found him. Yes. “Does... he look like me?”

Catra is practically carrying her as they leave the cell. She can hear movement echoing in the silent corridors beyond. Catra growls faintly at the sound, shifts her weight. Adora tries to help, but Catra moves with an urgency she can’t match. “Come with me and find out.”

Adora steps on something wrong, half-dead nerves not quite placing her foot flat, and her weight slides on something slick and oily. Broken bones shift under her skin, and whatever happens next doesn’t quite register next to the oppressive _fog_ of pain that rises all around her.

She wakes again with her jaw clenched so tightly it’s spasming, and Catra has shifted to carrying her outright. They’re running now, or Catra is, and the jostling makes it hard to breathe. Something warm and sticky coats the space between the two of them, skin against skin. She feels nauseous. “I don’t like this dream.”

“You and me both.” Catra sounds breathless now, and the words are nonsense. How long has it been? 

She doesn’t have time to wonder before Catra propels them both sideways with a lurch. Adora feels the press of tight space, caught between Catra’s body along her front and cool silicon wall at her back. Vaguely she feels Catra shift her weight on her back, bracing her legs one handed to bare her claws with the other. Something ‒ several somethings ‒ whir past them, and Adora feels Catra tense beneath her, coiled muscle waiting to strike.

“Adora,” Catra hisses, “I know you’re probably really confused right now, but if you could bring out the magic sword, that would be great.”

She shakes her head mutely, forehead pressed into the back of Catra’s neck, and tries to reel in the dizziness that simple movement causes. There’s a skittering sound out in the dark ‒ _lots_ of them, many-legged and getting close. Something massive slides wetly along the slick floor. 

It doesn’t matter. No matter what they throw at her, Adora won’t give in.

Catra swears and raises her free hand to her ear. “Sparkles, I need evac, _badly.”_ A beat. “About two clicks south of the rendezvous point, it’s a straight shot.”

A shriek in the dark. Adora’s ears ring in tandem to the shooting pain as Catra adjusts her grip again. So strong, Adora thinks, pressing close to her warm back while she can. Catra was always so strong.

“Adora, I’m going to put you down,” Catra whispers frantically. Adora whines a protest, tries to keep hold as she is lowered to the floor. Catra pries Adora’s hands off of her as gently as she can. “Stay here, don’t make a sound. Glimmer will be here soon.”

Adora just curls involuntarily. She can’t draw out the nice part any longer, the part where she sees her loved ones again, gets to speak to them, touch them. Now it is only going to hurt.

“I love you,” she whispers. A little ritual of hers. A goodbye, until the next time.

Catra hesitates only a moment. “You’ll be okay, I promise.”

Then she runs.

Adora can barely hear the sounds of fighting nearby over the pounding of her heart, and tries not to visualize what she hears. Catra hiding in the shadows, pouncing when she can and then darting away. Catra calling out taunts to keep the attention on herself, away from Adora. Catra screaming in pain when she is inevitably caught.

It’s nearly identical to the scream Adora heard in the Heart, the one that made her turn back. She tries to block out the sound, tears pouring down her cheeks. Catra can’t do this on her own.

“Adora!” 

Catra’s voice is so far away. Adora tries to push it away further. She can’t give in. She won’t. 

“Adora, you need to transform! She-Ra will heal you!”

“I won’t,” Adora wimpers, covering her ears. “You can’t fool me. I won’t do it.”

Something glows a sickly green, lashing out toward the sound of Catra’s voice. Adora curls further. The pressure on her torso and limbs is excruciating, but Catra’s pleading hurts even worse. Magic swells in her, the instinct to protect screaming at her to make this all stop. _No, no, no, I won’t, I refuse ‒_

“Adora, _please!”_

The words are in her throat, but she clenches her teeth and refuses to let them out, denies the white light of a sword flickering entreatingly at her hand. A roar rises in her ears, power unable to be contained ‒

The lights flash on with a mechanical _clunk,_ causing Adora’s eyes to water and pupils to retract to pinpoints. Arrows fly in from somewhere, exploding into nets or sticky globs, or just plain exploding. Sigils, too, they fly by in glowing patterns, knocking away drones and mechanical spiders in droves. A blinding wave of sparkling light _engulfs_ the tentacled monstrosity dangling Catra above its maw, charring its flesh but not destroying it entirely.

“Over here, I got her!” a voice nearby yells. Male, familiar ‒ Bow? _Adam?_ Calloused hands reach for her wrists and tug, then he gasps at the touch of the sodden fabric wrapping them. “Glimmer, get us out, _now!”_

A familiar buzz of magic, a warm, small hand at her shoulder, Catra’s labored breathing. The world is gone for an instant ‒ 

And then it’s quiet.

‒

They had found Eternia.

The last stronghold of the First Ones, before the Horde wiped them all out, was still sending a masked signal into the cosmos. _Come to us,_ it said. _Help us,_ it said.

 _We seek our missing daughter,_ it said.

Adora’s long-lost family, dangled on the end of a string like a lure. Parents. A twin brother. All the belonging she had always longed for. She fell for it, of course, selfish, sentimental fool that she was. The only things left on Eternia were ghosts.

Well. Ghosts and programs, kept alive by tech that needed no human to sustain it. 

Light Hope was an AI created to expand the First Ones’ Empire at any cost. Of course other instances of her roamed Eternia’s abandoned network. These versions of Light Hope had never known Mara’s kindness. They still sought to control the power of She-Ra. To bind her powers to a new artificial runestone, the last one still remaining after rebel squadron Grayskull brought down the system’s infrastructure. The twin to Adora’s Sword of Protection ‒ Adam’s Sword of Power. 

Adam, whom they had kept for the exact same purpose. A conduit for stolen magic, a weapon with no choice in the matter.

It was a trap. One Adora didn’t see coming until it snapped shut around her. And one she couldn’t get herself out of without giving them exactly what they wanted.

But the others would save her. 

The others would get her out, and Adam too.

All she had to do was ‒ was ‒ 

‒

Flickering lights above her head, pressure on both her wrists ‒ painful, but groundingly so. 

“Can you fix her?”

“I’m trying, but I don’t know a lot about healing magic. We... we always had She-Ra for that...”

“Augh! _Redundancies,_ Sparkles, ever heard of ‘em?!”

“Not the time, you two!” Adora’s eyelids flutter, and the voices seem to grow closer, realer. Pain flares and recedes in bits and pieces, shifting around in her insides. “Catra, hold these for me, I’m going to find Entrapta.”

“She’s not a doctor, Bow!” Yes, Adora knows these voices.

“She’s the closest we’ve got!”

The pressure on her wrists shifts, then tightens, and Adora hisses through her teeth. Magic courses through her body. She feels it, realigning her bones from bottom to top, and then realizes ‒ this can’t be happening. Adora _mustn’t_ become She-Ra, not even to use her magic to save herself. But if the magic is _in_ her, did she ‒? But she can’t have, she _wouldn’t_ have ‒ 

“Adora, stop it!” The hands on her wrists press her down, trying and failing to contain Adora’s panicked flailing. She rolls her body, trying to get at least one shoulder off the ground, but a half-healed bone in her arm cracks with the movement. The sound that comes out of her is somewhere between a gasp and a moan. “Adora ‒ Adora, look at me!”

Her eyes snap wide and she glances frantically around. Steel, gray on gray ‒ not the changeable tech-riddled halls of First Ones temples, but a ship. Mara’s ship. Catra is gripping Adora’s wrists for all she’s worth, stemming the flow of blood that refuses to clot on its own. Glimmer stands above her, mouth set in a grim line, hands flying through the air above her drawing spell after spell.

Adora whimpers. “Catra... I didn’t... She-Ra, they ‒”

“It’s okay.” Catra nuzzles her face in lieu of having her hands free. “They didn’t get you, they’re gone. _We’re_ gone. We’re going home.”

 _Home..._ Adora tries to breathe and coughs painfully. She tastes copper. “My family?”

Catra glances upward at Glimmer, then back to her. “Just focus on healing right now, okay?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Adam, where is he? You said ‒”

“We’re taking care of him,” Catra insists. “But you need rest too.”

“I can set your bones, mostly,” Glimmer says, face tight and brows drawn. “But there’s something _in_ you, some... some _poison_ that won’t let the bleeding stop.”

 _Blood thinners._ Adora remembers that part ‒ the injection just before the slit wrists, preceded by bone after methodically broken bone. The AI’s last-ditch effort to get her to ‒

“You need to transform into She-Ra to save yourself.”

Adora’s face falls. She turns her head away with a faint sigh. “I won’t,” she breathes, resigned.

Glimmer frowns, astonished. “Why not? You’re bleeding out this way, but with She-Ra you’ll heal, you’ll be better. We can all go home.”

She could almost laugh at the disappointment. “How many times are you going to try the same trick?” she murmurs, barely audible. There’s no real need to speak up ‒ she’s only talking to herself, after all. “I _know_ crystal castles can project memories, alright? Tell me what I want to hear? You can’t fool me no matter how many times you try.”

Catra looks first stricken, then furious beyond words. Glimmer goes deathly pale, both hands rise to cover the lower half of her face. “Adora,” she says from behind her hands, “this is real. You’re really safe, we’re here.”

Adora smiles. “It’s okay. I like this part of the visions ‒ the part where I’m with you all, and get to see you and talk to you. I just want to enjoy it, before it starts to go bad again. They always try and get me to save you, but. You’re not really here.”

“I _am_ here,” Catra says, low and angry.

Adora shifts her arm weakly. Catra adjusts to let her. She rests her hand against Catra’s forearm, rubs her thumb back and forth over the short, downy fur. 

“I miss you so much,” Adora whispers.

On the real Catra, Adora can track every emotion that passes through her face if she pays enough attention. This one, though, goes curiously blank, eyes wide and pupils pinned, hands shaking through their tight grip. It reminds Adora of their time in the Heart, actually

‒

Even with blood transfusions, it’s difficult to hold onto consciousness for very long. 

Whenever she is awake, they try to convince her:

_We promise, this is real. You’re safe._

_The Sword of Power is gone, just like the Sword of Protection. They can’t control anything anymore._

_Eternia is lightyears away by now. Even if they could steal She-Ra’s power, there’s no way they could get a lock on her energy signal from here._

Adora’s heard all of it before. It’s always been “you must” this and “it’s the only way” that. Lives on the line, whether her friends’ or her own. 

Forcing Adora to bleed out without magical aid is just the latest in a long line of attempts.

Glimmer or Bow or occasionally Entrapta will come into her room to change the bandages on her wrists, or pour more blood into Adora’s arm to replace what flows out, soaked into the cloth wraps or dripping into bowls at her sides. Past the open door, Adora can see Catra, seated on the floor just across the hallway with Melog’s head in her lap. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t ever come in. But she also never seems to move away. Adora wishes so much that she would.

Sometimes Adora thinks of Adam. Wonders whether that might be the one chink in her reasoning ‒ that, in this version of events, they somehow got him out of there, away from their control. If this was another illusion meant to force Adora into transforming, wouldn’t her twin brother continue to be in peril?

But whenever she asks, they repeat the same line: _You need to get better first._

And therein lies the trap. These illusions always withhold something that Adora wants ‒ sometimes multiple somethings ‒ with transforming into She-Ra as the only means of obtaining it. Adora’s friends won’t let her see Adam until she heals herself with She-Ra’s magic.

That means it’s a lie. All of it.

‒

Catra has moved.

Adora isn't sure when she noticed this fact. Time slips by so easily. One minute, the stretch of wall opposite her bed was empty. The next, Catra was planted on the floor with Melog behind her as an agreeable back rest, comfortably (if stiffly) sprawled as though she had been there for hours.

Adora floats in that half-awake state she seems to spend most of her time in, smiling lazily at her love. She doesn’t have it in her anymore to yearn for the past or hope for the future ‒ the present is already more than she can carry. But sometimes the present gets to just be _this._ Presence. Little blocks of respite to cherish, until it all moves on. Or ends.

Another blink, and Catra has noticed her staring. “Hey, Adora.” She doesn’t smile.

Adora smiles back anyway. “Hey, Catra.”

Catra pulls one knee up close to her chest and hugs it close. “You’re dying,” she informs her.

“I usually am,” agrees Adora.

A muscle in Catra’s jaw twitches, and Melog’s mane flickers with red sparks. When she speaks again, there’s a thickness to her voice that makes Adora’s heart clench to hear. “You don’t _have_ to be. You don’t.”

Adora _aches_ to go to her. This is the part where she normally would ‒ where she would approach Catra and beg her to understand, and Catra would be hurt and run from her arms. Just like that night in the Whispering Woods, the night before Adora descended into the Heart of Etheria. The worst pain, a true knife to the heart, and the only thing Adora ever turned from her mission for. 

It wasn’t a mistake, then. She knows that. But it would be now.

“Why do I have to watch it happen?” Catra pleads, and Adora knows Catra is thinking of the same memory as her. What Adora doesn’t know how much of this she’s missed, how much time skips by without her knowing. Her breathing is so shallow now. “Why do you keep making me watch you leave?”

“I’m sorry...” she whispers, halfway apologizing for losing focus in addition to... well, everything.

“Don’t be sorry, _do something_ about it!” Catra snarls. It is abruptly cut off when Melog swings its large head to shove against Catra, knocking her briefly off-balance with a low warning churr. Catra pushes the heels of her palms into her eyes, and takes a breath. 

Against her friends’ best efforts, Adora doesn’t have enough fluid in her for tears. Her eyes burn instead. “This is all I _can_ do...”

“Don’t give me that shit.”

“I won’t be _used,_ Catra,” Adora pleads, a prayer as much as a whimper. “For so long, a _tool_ was all I was. For Shadow Weaver, for Light Hope... I’m done with it. I’m so much more than just a weapon, and Catra ‒” Her throat closes, and she swallows. “You’re so much more than just mine.”

A ringing silence that might just be Adora losing consciousness again. This round will end soon, or maybe the First Ones will give up after this, let her finally die. She doesn't want to. She doesn’t want to walk away from the mad, beautiful scramble that greets her each day with clumsy enthusiasm, stubbornly graceless and endlessly surprising. It’s a life worth living, a life she never thought she’d get to have.

Might not get to have, now.

Catra shakes her head mutely, backing away with tears in her eyes. Adora tries to reach out, but her limbs are like lead, numb and bluntly useless. She wills movement through them anyway, manages to knock over one of the bowls beneath her wrists. It must have been changed recently, because it clatters to the ground without spilling much. Her hand is skeletal and pale.

“Catra,” she begs, knowing it’s futile at this stage but unable to restrain herself. “Please hold me.”

Catra stills at the request, stares at Adora with sharp, overfull eyes. “...Fine.”

Adora blinks.

Catra closes the distance in two purposeful strides, edging a hip onto the bed next to Adora and curling her legs up. “You don’t need to be She-Ra,” Catra says as she lays down on her side and loops an arm under Adora’s head, the other splayed across her shoulders. “You just need to be alive. So if I stay with you, you have to stay with me. Got it?”

This isn’t what Adora expected. She didn’t expect Catra to comb her claws gently through her hair. She didn’t expect Catra to draw her into her chest to feel the full force of her demanding purr. And when Adora twitched a feeble hand, overwhelmed, she didn’t expect Catra to pick it up and lay it along her own face in a caress, exactly where Adora wanted to be.

It is a constant in Adora’s life that Catra shuts down when confronted with unfortunate realities, her brilliant mind warring with her fragile heart. She’ll withdraw, she’ll attack, she’ll outright run away, never seeing Adora’s own survival-based terror, that desperate need to ceaselessly push all the way through the bad times and pray that she reaches something kinder on the other side. Adora will plow stubbornly onward, Catra will refuse to engage ‒ running in opposite directions when all they really wanted was to meet in the middle.

_Run away with me._

_Stay with me._

_I need you._

The beats of their lives, repeating like the tide, until suddenly they weren’t. Because Catra’s grown beyond that night in the woods. Maybe, just maybe, so has Adora.

The words aren’t necessary, merely a trigger of association. The First Ones assigned the phrase as a password, probably to remind the bearer of the Sword where her loyalties were meant to lie any time she accessed the power. But Adora never knew anything about Grayskull, whoever he was. Instead, the words make her think of Mara’s rebels, _their_ honor. How they how they never knew for certain if their actions were the right ones, but acted because something in them believed it so.

Adora thinks she can fight for that.

“I will,” she says, more calmly than she feels. “I promise.” 

They are words enough. 

The change in the blue of her eyes is reflected in Catra’s gold, and Adora holds onto her for everything she’s worth.

She keeps on holding long after the transformation is complete, shaking despite the sudden absence of pain. Catra lets her, scratching gently at Adora’s scalp and maintaining a soothing purr. She is, Adora notices, clinging back just as tightly.

Nothing happens. There is only the steady pattern of Catra’s breathing matching Adora’s own.

Eventually she pulls back, lifts a hand to examine it. Magic rises at her fingertips, vast and wholly her own. 

“I told you they were gone,” Catra says quietly. When Adora doesn’t reply she adds, tentatively, as though asking might undo whatever spell was cast, “What... what made you change your mind?”

For a long moment Adora just stares. How do you explain the shift in perspective brought about by a sudden lack of a ransom on her compliance? Adora asked to be held and Catra gave in without question, asking not for She-Ra’s magic but for Adora to stay. There’s nothing in the universe more real to Adora than that.

“I remembered ‒ that we’ve changed.” Adora’s words are halting, carefully chosen. She frowns. “We aren’t caught in that _loop_ anymore, of ‒ of reaching and running, pushing and pulling. And if _we_ aren’t, then. It made me think that I couldn’t be either.”

Catra’s expression puts Adora in mind of spring thunderstorms, of oceanic magma eruptions, brief and devastating and _vital._

Adora kisses her, gentle at first, but gradually pressing closer and needier with some pent-up emotion, too staggering and wonderful to name, and her body shrinks back down as She-Ra drifts peacefully away, unneeded.

‒

Melog comes back in, leading Bow and Glimmer. Bow looks stressed; Glimmer looks positively _exhausted_ from the effort of keeping Adora alive this long. But they both light up upon seeing their friend alive and whole once more. They gasp their elation and gather her and Catra both up in shaking handfuls, hauling them close in a group hug that Adora hasn’t felt in what seems like forever.

Bow asks, full of concern and utter sincerity, if Adora is okay.

Adora is slow to respond, arms hesitant and creeping as they return the embrace. “I’m sorry to have put you through all that.”

“Wrong answer,” Glimmer prods, smirking. “Try again.”

Hysterical tears lurk underneath the bubble of laughter that follows, but Adora smiles through them. “I’m okay,” she says thickly. “Thank you for bringing me home.”

_Home..._

“Adam!” Adora gasps at the recollection. “Is he okay? Was he hurt when you found him? I can heal him if ‒” She pauses at the dark, guilty looks on all of their faces. “What?”

The three of them exchange looks with one another, and Adora’s heartbeat skyrockets, fearing the worst. Did her brother die from some unknown wounds while Adora was lost in her own head? That can’t be, they would have told her if he was in danger, as an extra incentive... but no, this is real life. Her friends would have kept it from her to spare her that burden, but now that it’s here ‒ 

“...Adora, there never was an Adam.”

She freezes, and the voice that comes out is so very, very small. “...what?”

Catra threads her fingers together with Adora’s, squeezing lightly. Glimmer takes her other hand gently and says. “Those messages about your family were all completely fabricated. I’m so sorry, Adora.”

“Light Hope transmitted everything she knew when she brought us out of Despondos,” Bow elaborates, eyebrows pinched tight. “Those other versions of her, they knew there was only one thing that would draw you in, so... they made the whole thing up.”

“No,” Adora shakes her head, her mouth twisting. “No, no, you’re wrong ‒”

“Adora, _think_ about it.” Catra grips her shoulders, forcing Adora to look at her. “If they already had Adam as their weapon, why would they need you? Why lure you in at all?”

“B-because they keep his magic suppressed with their tech.” Adora knows she’s reaching, but the alternative hurts too much. “My magic is free from them, it’s stronger.”

But they would only bind her magic again when she was caught. That was the entire point. Even if they worried Adora could take Adam in a fight and wanted to neutralize a threat to their power, they knew she could never, would never truly hurt him.

They knew, because Light Hope knew. All those simulations fighting Catra and never once could she strike the final blow. 

There was no force in the world that could beat the love out of Adora.

She shakes, wrapping her arms around herself, and the tears in her eyes finally fall. “There ‒ there has to be someone out there looking for me. There has to ‒ Catra, I can’t ‒ I can’t just be _nothing!”_

Bow and Glimmer are on her at once, holding Adora together as she threatens to shake apart. 

“You’re _not_ nothing,” Catra wraps her arms around her, a hug as fierce as it is kind. “You never were. Never.”

Adora buries her face in Catra’s shoulder, falls to pieces in her friends’ arms. And she mourns.

‒

Etheria is amazing. Old and weird and utterly beautiful. Untamable forests and fathomless seas, gorgeous monsters newly awakened, thriving on its ancient, wild magic. Nothing can control this place. None who live here would want to. Etheria, unfettered, is pure enchantment ‒ the most magical place in the universe.

Maybe Eternia was something like this, once. From what Adora saw on its surface before she was captured, it seemed like it was in the process of becoming like this again. Maybe give it another thousand years, wait for the remaining AIs to run themselves down in isolation. It could be habitable again. It could someday be home to miraculous creatures, untold magic, and infinite love.

But whatever its potential, Adora would never get to see it.

The ship makes landfall on the outskirts of the new Scorpion Kingdom, one of the few places that has the infrastructure to dock spaceships without a dramatic crash landing. Surprisingly, Kyle and Rogelio are the first people she sees when the door lowers itself down. Kyle throws himself at her in an enthusiastic hug, and Lonnie nearby offers her a smirk and a comradely fistbump.

Entrapta, after it being thoroughly impressed upon her that having and maintaining a working spaceship was to be her highest priority, took off in the _Darla_ again, this time headed to Dryl to show all of her off-world findings to Hordak. Adora thinks again of the portal that brought her here, from a place she knows now that she can never return to, and wonders how he’s doing.

She can’t wonder long, because Scorpia arrives with one of her own frankly legendary hugs. Then she’s off again, ushering the four of them back to Etheria with all manner of pomp and circumstances that she fully admits is all experimental, since very few of her family’s traditions survived the Horde’s purge. Scorpia asks what they think of her new ideas. Bow is gushingly positive about the whole thing.

Perfuma isn’t far, due to Plumaria’s proximity to the old Fright Zone. She and Catra exchange a smile and a knowing look as Perfuma wraps up Scorpia’s claw with a delicate hand. She also brings word from Frosta and Mermista ‒ they’ll be heading to Brightmoon next week to discuss all of their findings on the Best Friend Squad’s space roadtrip.

It takes ages to properly disentangle from it all, but Adora finds all the bluster and movement oddly calming. She had imagined, before, what it would be like to have a family. It occurs to her that perhaps there’s a reason the best comparison she could come up with was just _this_ ‒ people coming together, full of excitement and exasperation and love. 

Adora knows what that feels like. Maybe she always has.

It doesn’t stop her from missing what she’s lost ‒ what she never had to begin with.

But she thinks of Micah, waiting in Brightmoon with a cup of tea and a strategy game to play. Castaspella, with tea cakes and scented candles and a new dress that Adora will certainly hate. Lance and George and all their insufferable doting. It’s enough, isn’t it?

‒

In the tallest tower in Brightmoon Palace, Catra finds Adora staring at the stars. 

She doesn’t say anything for a long time, only standing next to Adora, leaning her forearms against the railing.

“Is it fucked up that I still think about Shadow Weaver sometimes?” Catra asks out of nowhere.

Adora is surprised. “What? No, of course not!”

Catra just nods, eyes still on the twinkling sky. “Perfuma said something to me a few days before we left. Melog was there, so I was able to talk about... about what she did, in the end. How I felt about it.”

Adora has no idea where this is going, so she just waits for Catra to continue.

“It ‒ it’s not _just_ that I hate her. I do. But not because of everything she did to me, not really.” Catra sniffs a bit, gripping the railing tightly. Adora puts a hand on her shoulder that she hopes is comforting. “It’s just that, in the end... it turned out she was always capable of _actually_ caring about us. Of doing right by us. She just chose not to.”

Adora slips behind Catra and presses warmly against her, arms looped around her waist and chin propped on her shoulder. Catra relaxes against her with a rush of released breath. “She was a bad person, Catra,” Adora reminds gently. “Maybe she hoped saving our lives would make up for that, but it doesn’t have to. Not if you don’t want.”

Catra shakes her head. “I know, but that’s not what I’m getting at. What hurt the most was this idea that ‒ that she _took_ something from me. The mother I was supposed to have, who loved me. She denied me that, by choosing to be the way that she was.”

Adora tightens her arms in a squeeze, but Catra twists around in her grip to face her, clawed hands coming up to frame her face. 

“That’s why I cried, down in the Heart,” Catra admits. “It wasn’t really for her. I was mourning someone who never existed.”

Adora chokes on her own breath, tears springing to her eyes without any warning. Her face screws up and her shoulders hitch with uneven breaths, and she sobs.

“I keep having these dreams,” she cries, “where he’s here, he came back with us, and I show him around Brightmoon or take him for rides on Swift Wind. And he could tell me about our parents and ‒ and everything I missed when I was stolen away!”

Catra tucks Adora’s head under her chin, cradling it close. There’s nothing she can say. Even if there were easy answers, Catra would be the last person who would know them. 

So they just hold each other through their mutual sorrow, until it passes.

  
  
  
  


(It does pass, as all things do.

When they are ready, their family is waiting for them.

It does not, cannot compare to a cruel lie or an ephemeral wish.

But it serves.

And when Adora watches her family of choice bicker and play, support and tease, work and live and laugh and _love_ ‒ 

‒ she can’t think of a single thing that she might have missed out on.)

**Author's Note:**

> I am begging y’all to hit me with that comment serotonin bc I _need_ it after -gestures widely at everything-


End file.
